The Cabinet of Borrowed Breath

A short story by Jules Laurent

The first time I opened the cabinet, the light changed.

It wasn’t dramatic at first—just a hush that moved across the library like a cat stepping onto a piano and deciding not to make a sound. Miss Petrescu, our librarian, calls it “the settling,” the way air makes room for things older than itself.

The cabinet sits behind the reference desk, disguised as a double-doored thing for maps. But its label is written in a precise hand: Lost & Found of Languages. Seniors say it’s been here since before the new gym, before the 3D printers, before the school board voted to call us an International Academy and put slogans in five languages on the banners. They say it arrived with Miss Petrescu, in the same way certain teachers arrive with weather—some bring storms, some bring drought, and a few bring the damp promise of gardens.

I didn’t believe any of it until I was assigned to library service hours and handed the small brass key.

“Only open it when someone asks,” she said. “And only check out a word if you’ve tried to live without it and failed.”

There are rules tacked inside the doors: no photocopying, no hoarding, return the word by the moon’s third quarter (someone added “or you’ll never stop dreaming in subtitles” in green marker), and—underlined twice—speak the word out loud. Words are like birds. They die in glass boxes.

Students come by between classes, sheepish, curious, or desperate. They fill out checkout cards with their names and a line that says Why do you need this word? The cabinet is full of shoe-boxes instead of shoes, each labeled in faded pencil: lullaby, bargaining, weather, joke, apology, home. The words are tucked inside on slips of soft paper, written in their original scripts with a translation that is never quite a translation, but more like a promise.

The second time I opened the cabinet was for myself.

My grandmother used to hum while she sorted lentils on a metal tray, bright little suns sliding under her ring finger. When I’d ask what she was humming, she would smile and say, “Your mother’s temper.” And then: “The word is sakoon, Leila. Sakoon means the kind of quiet your bones recognize.”

After she died last winter, our apartment turned itself inside out. My mother cooked in silence. My father started talking to the houseplants. Every sound was too sharp—forks hitting plates, the radiator’s cough, my own voice catching on the weather.

I came to the cabinet because there was a fat, unnameable thing stuck in our living room. I thought, If I can borrow the word, maybe the thing will finally have a name and a door.

The sakoon slip was small and warm, as if it had been inside a pocket. On one side: سکون. On the other: “sakoon — not just silence, but a silk silence that wraps you. The quiet after a prayer, the calm of a hand placed on your back saying, I’m here.”

I said it aloud where no one could hear me. “Sakoon.”

The air folded. The radiator ceased its ancient wheeze; the recycling truck outside softened its metallic roar into a distant river. Even my own breath seemed to learn manners. I said it again, and the hush followed me out of the library and all the way to third period calculus, where it politely asked the graphing calculators to behave.

For two days, the word traveled with me like a faint perfume. At home, the TV news stopped shouting. My parents sat at the table and said nothing, but this time their silence was companionable, with room for soup. I wrote on the checkout card: Needed for bones. On the “return by” line, I traced the moon in pencil, bought a calendar, and looked up what third quarter meant.

After that, I watched the cabinet like a fever watcher.

A freshman from Lagos borrowed ọ̀wọ̀n (“precious, dear one”) and left with his eyes bright as if he’d found a missing tooth. A girl from Kraków checked out przeciąg (“a draft that sneaks under doors”) and came back with a scarf and a story about arguing with her mother through winter. A boy with a nervous laugh asked if we had something for the feeling of reading a book so good you never want to finish it. Miss Petrescu handed him meraki (“to leave a piece of your soul in your work”) and he whispered it like a spell.

The third time I opened the cabinet, Miss Petrescu leaned on the desk and said, “Good. You’re here.”

“We’re missing komorebi,” she said. “It’s usually in the Weather box.”

I pulled the drawer: apologies, fog, homesickness, light. The compartments were neat, but there was a gap where there shouldn’t be. Komorebi is a Japanese word for sunlight filtering through leaves. Last month, a chemistry teacher checked it out for a nature-writing unit and the entire sophomore class wrote about photosynthesis like it was a love letter. They returned it on time. I remember, because the reading room had been full of dappled light that day, and I had the sudden urge to skip class and lie on the carpet.

“Words go missing,” I said. “Sometimes people forget.”

“They don’t forget,” Miss Petrescu said quietly. “They think they can keep them by hiding them. But words don’t like cages.”

She lifted the Weather box and we both saw it: a faint outline in dust where komorebi used to rest. The dust wasn’t the powdery kind, but more like glittering pollen. It smeared green-gold across my fingertip. I thought of someone walking around with that light stuck to their palm, not knowing the pollen needed a tree.

“You return sakoon next week?” she asked, too casual.

“In three days,” I said. I had marked it. I had counted. I had willed the moon to obey.

“Good,” she said, and turned to help a kid who needed the word for the joke you tell to soften bad news.

That night, I fell asleep with the slip under my pillow and dreamt of a cabinet with drawers that couldn’t close because of all the words pressing against the wood, murmuring to be let out. In the dream, someone was walking away with a handful of slips, and each word flapped in their grasp like a wing.

On the second day of looking for komorebi, we lost saudade.

We discovered it in the Love box because of the whisper that rose when a sophomore opened it. Saudade is Portuguese and no translation fits it, but people try: a sweet ache for something or someone absent but present in the heart, a longing that tastes of salt and oranges. We lend it out like it’s a fragile teacup. People return it with their eyes a little swollen, or a new letter half-written in their bag, or a voicemail not yet sent.

I touched the space where it used to be. The outline wasn’t dust this time but a damp ring, like a glass had sweated and left a mark. My fingertip smelled like the inside of old envelopes.

“Someone’s taking them,” I said.

“That would still be someone who belongs to us,” Miss Petrescu said. “This cabinet only feeds the hungry.”

We could have processed it, filed incident reports. Instead, we made flyers: MISSING WORDS. If you have seen ‘komorebi’ or ‘saudade,’ please return them to the library. No questions asked. Reward: dappled light and orange peel breath. We posted them on the language board between Spanish Club and International Potluck sign-ups.

People laughed. A teacher said, “When the librarian goes feral.” But a line formed at the desk anyway. Students returned all kinds of things: a Neapolitan curse that didn’t belong to them, a Swahili proverb about cows and patience, a small lullaby in Tamil that had been tucked in a geometry book to keep the proofs from crying.

No komorebi. No saudade.

That evening, my mother found the flyer in my jacket.

“What is this?” she asked, light as a test question. She’d been lighter lately. She’d started humming while she cooked again, quietly, as if a shy animal had returned to the apartment and could be scared away. I had not told her about sakoon. I wanted to give her the feeling without telling her it was borrowed.

“Library joke,” I said. I went to my room and looked at the moon, a polite slice in the window.

When I slid open my desk drawer to start my English homework, the guilty thing revealed itself.

Beneath the notebook where I have been pretending to understand metaphors, under my bus pass and a photo strip from the fall fair, there was a nest of slips. They had arranged themselves like feathers. I hadn’t meant to take them. That’s not true. I hadn’t meant to take them all. The first was sakoon. The second was komorebi, somehow slipped into my messenger bag after we looked for it, the gold dust smudged into the canvas. The third was saudade, which I must have pulled the day my father sat with the photo album and closed it on his hand.

I hadn’t meant to keep them. I had meant to keep us from breaking.

I touched komorebi and my desk lit with leaf-light, green and patient. It pooled on the floor as if there were a tree upstairs and we lived under an orchard. I touched saudade and my grandmother’s voice came through the heating vent, laughing at a joke no one had told. I pressed sakoon against my lips and the apartment’s hum lowered; the distant sirens turned to water and ran away.

I thought of the rules: no hoarding. Of Miss Petrescu’s phrase: words don’t like cages. The slips were soft around the edges, like leaves gone tender. It occurred to me that if I kept them, they might dissolve completely—not because the habit would fade, but because the words would give themselves to me until they died.

In the morning, I carried my backpack like it was a birdhouse and went early to the library.

Miss Petrescu was shelving returns. She looked up, took in my face, then my bag, then me again. “We found the thief,” she said, and to my surprise, she sounded relieved.

“I didn’t—” I started, and then I shut up. I unzipped the bag and set the slips on the desk as if they might spook.

“We don’t keep them because we don’t need to,” she said. “We share them because we do.”

“I was afraid,” I said. “If I returned sakoon, the quiet would go. If I returned saudade, my grandmother would be gone again. If I returned komorebi, winter would come inside.”

She handed me the stamp and the ink pad. “Mark the return date,” she said. “Then say each word out loud, and let it do what it came to do.”

I stamped the dates. The ink bled a little, the way my eyes did. And then, in the empty library with the first period bell still a rumor, I said the words:

“Sakoon.” The room steadied. The lights hummed as if someone had oiled their hinges.

Somewhere down the hall, a teacher stopped mid-shout and, after a beat, laughed.

“Komorebi.” Sunlight fingered its way through the high windows, even though there were no leaves outside—just October sky and the square shoulders of the gym. The light made a delicate lattice on the carpet, and the book return slot shone like a small river mouth.

“Saudade.” It arrived like orange zest under my tongue, sweet and stinging. My grandmother’s laugh lived in it, and my mother’s hands, and the shape of the apartment before the winter. It hurt and warmed me in the same breath.

I set the slips into their boxes. The air felt thinner and kinder.

At lunch, a crowd gathered. Someone had heard the light was back. A kid stood in the komorebi and held his hands out like he was warming them over a campfire. Another girl whispered saudade and then texted her aunt. People wrote their own words on sticky notes and pressed them to the cabinet doors: nunchi (Korean, “the art of sensing the room”), duende (Spanish, “the spirit that makes art burn”), baklava (okay, that one is dessert but the note said “the sound of this word makes me less alone,” and who can argue with that).

A teacher from chemistry asked for a word to make the lab less terrifying. We gave her sakoon and she walked out like a tuning fork that had finally found the right note.

After school, I found a new sign taped above the cabinet handle. It wasn’t Miss Petrescu’s looping script. It was blocky and earnest, done with a thick marker and the muscle of someone who hadn’t ever labeled anything carefully.

YOUR WORD IS NOT A PET. IT IS A BRIDGE.

There was no name, but I recognized my own handwriting.

Before I left, I checked the return dates again. The moon would be third quarter tomorrow. I thought of my mother humming. I thought of backbone in the quiet. I thought of how a word is alive only when it is carried on breath.

On my way out, a freshman hovered by the desk, checkout card clutched tight.

“What do you need?” I asked.

He swallowed. “There’s a… a thing I’m trying to say. When you smell rain but it hasn’t rained. My father says it’s in his language but he can’t remember.”

I opened the Weather box. A slip waited there like a small, patient animal. I handed it to him.

“Petrichor,” he read. He said it again, and the hallway brightened with a scent that didn’t belong to the building at all. He grinned, surprised at his own mouth.

“Speak it,” I told him. “Return it by the moon.”

He nodded. “I will.”

“Don’t keep it,” I added, and I couldn’t help the smile. “Let it keep you.”